I am jealous of everybody this month. Do you ever go through that? The blind, rage-worthy envy thing?

I think I got a little triggered by my week o' past-life travel, and I guess that's not really a surprise now that I think about it. I physically, plunge-pool-style dunked myself into three alternative life paths over the course of seven days, which is probably enough to--as they'd say here in England--do your f*cking head in.

I got jealous of my musician friends in Leeds who didn't waver in their pursuit of becoming professional artists and never had a back-up plan.

I got jealous of my friends in Berlin, who still live in Berlin, and are continuing to grow in a community that I now have to dip in and out of.

I got jealous of my doctor friends in Boston, who are thisclose to finishing their residencies and are starting to receive eye-watering (and I do mean *eye-watering*) salary offers.

I got jealous of my friends who are getting married, who are better at being single, who are having kids, who know they don't want kids, whose parents are richer than mine, whose art is better than mine, and--

*takes deep, gasping, cartoonish breath*

Maybe you know what I mean.

What I realized during my jealousy hangover, though, was this: It wasn't that I wanted their life or their career instead of my own. No, I wanted something way more ridiculous than that.

I wanted everybody's life, all the perks, all combined, all mine, forever and ever.

Which is really not a very helpful way to go about things when you're literally just one single human roaming around Planet Earth.

But this realization, that I wanted to be seventeen people at the same time, was weirdly soothing instead of depressing. Because it made me realize that I didn't actually want to be anybody else.

I just wished, like I think maybe we all do, that I could close my eyes for a minute and watch my own life play out in seventeen different ways to seventeen different endings.

To know, with complete confidence, that I was making the right choices this whole time.

But that technology isn't available yet. So, in the meantime, I guess forward is the only option.